How contract hour affects data collection when calculating daily and monthly station volumes

The global contract hour is used to timestamp daily and monthly station volume data. It determines the time range of data to search for when gathering data that contributes to station volume. The global contract hour is set in the configDesc, under the CD_CONTRACT_HOUR.

A global contract hour that has been set to 12:00 A.M. will result in searching for data that starts between the hours of 00:00 A.M. to 23:59:59 P.M. It will collect all data from contract hours occurring between 00:00 A.M. and 23:59 P.M. for the connected meters.

The meter contract hour is used to timestamp daily and monthly data that is read into the system, or generated by the system, such as estimates or aggregations.

The meter's contract hour is independent of the global contract hour. This means that the data may be input into the system at a different time than the global contract hour. It is important to understand how the balancing data is retrieved. The following diagram is designed to demonstrate where the data will 'fall' in a daily station volume balance (monthly would be similar but the range of the balance would be the month). To interpret the following diagram, assume the following:

• Global Contract Hour is set to 12:00 A.M.

• Meter 1 Contract Hour is set to 09:00 A.M.

• Meter 2 Contract Hour is set to 15:00 P.M.

balance1 data will include the 10/5 09:00 A.M., data for meter1 and 10/5 15:00 P.M., data for meter2

balance2 data will include the 10/6 09:00 A.M., data for meter1 and 10/6 15:00 P.M. data for meter2.